Time Does Not Bring Relief
by AmberPalette
Summary: Post-Evolution-R. Zelgadiss's thoughts upon the second death of Rezo, and Rezo's thoughts should he, as always before, respond to his great-grandson's call to return from the dead. My painful wish that the dead could really return to us alive and whole.


_Time does not bring relief; you all have lied_

_Who told me time would ease me of my pain!_

_I miss him in the weeping of the rain;_

… _at the shrinking of the tide;_

_The old snows melt from every mountain-side,_

_And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;_

_But last year's bitter loving must remain_

_Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!_

_There are a hundred places where I fear_

_To go,--so with his memory they brim!_

_And entering with relief some quiet place_

_Where never fell his foot or shone his face_

_I say, "There is no memory of him here!"_

_And so stand stricken, so remembering him!_

_~Edna St. Vincent Millay_

It's like seeing you through a thick plate of glass spanning the world, a cruelly thick, cruelly transparent wall of glass, endless. And you're facing away, and cannot hear me no matter how much I scream and pound and smash for your attention. You are everywhere and nowhere and I can't surmount that. It is one challenge I can never meet. In my most secret mind I am helpless.

The realization that you are gone-where it really, truly seeps into every inch of me like an acrid odor into my clothes, inescapable no matter how long I squeeze shut my nose-it's like that. It's like something omnipresent but impenetrable. Your death, and the knowledge that I must face everything, the vast terrible exhausting loneliness of everything, without you. For the rest of my life.

I'm always seeing you. I seek to be haunted.

Whenever I see an exquisite red scarf blazing defiantly in a market crowd. Any time that happens. There you are.

You wore red. So often it was your public namesake. Big, thick, lullaby-soft robes draped on your towering slim frame, making you the embodiment of something sacredly shrouded, but even more so, an embrace personified. Home itself was in your warm red-blanketed arms. So much that even a disgruntled boy, toddler or teen, always overcame his awkwardness with physical displays of affection to win a tight tender hug from you. You were never miserly with your hugs.

You were so gentle that I felt I needed to protect you from them. From all of them. All of those eyes that could see and scrutinize and appropriate and possess, when your eyes were helplessly closed.

I had to BE your eyes.

I had to be hard and strong and practical, the shell around you, that your soft sensitive melancholias, your dreams and impossible goals, your flights of scholarly hypotheses and charts and experiments, your philosophies on the gods and love and life and potential, could be preserved.

All of this inspired by a hug from a man in red robes. A hug. I never, ever resented it. Being your eyes was my life. I felt like a hero.

And that's why…when you turned on me…because That Thing was in you, sucking out your goodness like a leech drains a person of blood….that's why I shattered. I couldn't protect you after all. And you couldn't protect me anymore, either.

The hilt of my sword and the great circular brooch that I fasten to my cloak are red for a reason. None of my closest friends has ever pointed that out. I think they realize. I think they are trying to give me the privacy that I hoard. Surely they know why I cling to that color.

Sometimes, my lover even gives me one of her aching, helplessly mute, childlike stares, not quite pity, more like empathy. I see the pain of having her mother brutalized when she was a toddler in those two pools of sapphire. I think she can understand a little.

But she never really knew her mother. The pain of absence isn't as keen. A better analogy would be if her father had been taken from her. Her father who raised her, on whom she fixed all her aspirations, who came to embody safety and security and the notion that a few precious things do endure. Maybe then she would know the agony of being cast about without direction, aimlessly drifting the vain needle without a thread through the holes where all those things were abruptly taken, the sutures shredded.

But I am glad she doesn't really understand. I never want her to. I never want anyone I cherish to know how that feels. That dull throb that never subsides.

I wish you had met her. The woman I am in love with. You would have seen my youthful self in her. She is brash and opinionated, and she is generous and compassionate, and she is fiercely idealistic. A pixie-faced optimist. Just like I was. You would have adored her. You would have called her something like "Me-me" or "Tessie," I know. Because you were an incurable dork who loved stupidly sentimental nicknames. What were a few of mine? Your "sunshine," your "hedgehog," your "tough guy," your "grumpyhead." So embarrassing.

I loved all of them.

What am I going to do on my wedding day, when you aren't there to tell me to put my head between my legs and take deep breaths and not vomit on the highly expensive royal upholstery?

What am I going to do when she's pregnant? Who will help me understand the tidal waves of female hormones? Who will tell me how to delicately say "yes, you're fat, but you're still beautiful"?

Why can't you ever meet my babies? You would have spoiled them, taught them how to chart the constellations, how to pick locks, how to tell someone you love them in a thousand gestures and less than ten words-because they will be like me, so damnably bad at putting such core-deep feelings into spoken expression. You would have spent hours just running your big warm soft pale hands across the contours of their faces, memorizing them, like a favorite song, word for word, staccato little noses, slurring fluid jawlines, crescendoing big curious eyes. You would have set up a secret base for slumber parties for them under your bed, with pillows and lanterns and many, many deliciously thick dusty books full of exciting stories, ideas, and dreams. I know it. I lived it.

I need you. I need you. I need you. Come back. Fucking hell. Don't leave me. I don't even care if you're still sick. I don't even care if I have to play nursemaid forever. You gave me more than that occasional annoyance. Maybe I had to lift your crying face, caked in snot because your tears couldn't fall from sealed-shut eyes, off your examination table, off the stone chapel floor, off the dirt ground, after night-long hysterical terrors that contorted your body and your mind with the same scream, over and over, of "WHY WHY WHY." Maybe I had to expend some tears for you, because you couldn't shed them, and because I had no answer to that fervent, frothing question. Maybe.

But you were also the one who changed my bed every time I pissed in my sleep. You were the one who explained wet dreams when I got a little older, in a way that somehow didn't embarrass either of us. You were the one who cleaned sweat and vomit off my face when I had a fever, and blood and gravel out of the scrapes in my legs when I fell on the road. How could I ever resent you for your manic ravaging screaming highs, your breaking of glass tubes and of your voice in your throat? When you were such a prisoner, and your face always pleaded, in the shards and aftermath, for forgiveness? When those rages may have been BECAUSE you were so pure and weak and gentle? When ours was such a symbiotic existence?

I didn't mind holding you, rocking you to sleep, and never telling anyone that you crawled around on that laboratory floor shrieking and sobbing like a wounded animal. I didn't mind picking the glass out of your bloodied hands, and bandaging them. Fuck them all. I didn't mind. You sang me to sleep enough nights, after all. You laughed and crooned and sighed and soothed hundreds of thousands of times more than you wailed and wept. Fuck perfection. Heroes aren't perfect. Don't be ashamed. I can hold you some more. And them some more after that. Come back.

When something funny is said in a smoky, gaslit tavern, when someone roars a laugh, defiantly alive, appreciative, salutary, running radiantly up and down a scale like the shimmering, swelling, erratic glow of fire against the rainy window glass…when someone laughs like that, there you are. I stand immobile listening, and I smile. I fought for your laughter. Every time it bubbled up, like an epiphany striking everyone in the vicinity, infectious, it was a victory for me.

I'm told I talk in my sleep. I got that from you, too. Silly pleasant nonsensicalities. I wish you weren't sleeping so deeply, so eternally, now.

Please don't leave me. Don't leave me. Don't. I think I fought you so hard because I knew I had forgiven you the moment you had hurt me, and I was angry at myself for being unable to resist that grace. Justice demanded that I hate and reject you for betraying me. For turning my flesh into a grotesque quarry and for making it so that every time I looked in the mirror I saw evidence that my home and mentor and values and purpose had all abandoned me. Justice.

But when it comes to you, my typically rational, logically rigorous mind abandons me too. Always has. When it comes to you, I don't think, I only feel. I am compelled beyond reason. When it comes to you, I drop everything and follow, and pardon unconditionally.

And you always knew I would be there. Blind faith, it had new meaning for us. I could see your almost pathetic gratitude every time I squeezed your shoulder or spared a sentence of glowing praise. I could see how every time I reaffirmed how much I cared, it was to you a miracle at which to marvel.

You had two smiles: a real smile, and a fake smile. The real smile was always because of something I said or did: it started slow and it bloomed and it flourished, and it made those creases under your ever-closed eyes, the only evidence that you are centuries old and not an early thirty-something, stand out more. Because of me, and no one else.

I loved being so special.

If you could not have your sight, I wanted the fact that I was always right there at your side to be sufficient cause for your joy. Sometimes I believed it was. We had faith in each other.

I suppose your parasite knew that. I suppose that's how he broke us. Mocking that symbiotic bond. I suppose it's not so bad, then, that a part of me forgave you ten seconds after I ran away from home looking for that orihalcon statue with which I intended, paradoxically, to destroy you. You were like the victim of some kind of repulsive, chronic abuse: psychological, physical, emotional, and trapped not inside a barred-door shack but inside the frame of your own body. Maybe your eyes were sealed closed because your own body was trying to reject him, to seal him inside, to fight him down. Maybe you couldn't open them because you were good-not because he had afflicted you. How much struggle and strain was that? How much misery? How much was it like the body you put me in-in what ways, worse?

Sometimes I wonder if I could have done something. Could have caught on and realized what your anguished body and soul harbored. Could have stopped it. Did I fail you, Gramps?

I will never be complete again, without you. Without a past.

Old man, I'll always love you. And I always did.

Always.

Every night before bed, I will go out to the woods where they buried that tinkling metal staff you left behind, and I will kneel in the soil. Like an emotionally labile fool, I will take two hands full of that soil. I will grind my teeth red-faced and tearful, and whisper to the ground, "come back," and I will look up at the sky and plead "come back," and I will kiss the air as I wish I could kiss your eyelids, and reassure and bless your scarred soul, and I will apologize that not even I was enough to save you, and finally I will beg "rise up" over and over and over again until my voice is hoarse and I am exhausted. That's my plan. Every night, the rest of my life.

Because you are a part of me, and I am not whole. Because time does not bring relief.

* * *

Oh...this. It's what it must be like...to be born. Shall I cry...?

My baby. Don't be sad. I'm coming back.

It was sublime really when I died. It was warm and cool at the same time. Soothing. I could see...everything. Light all around me. Exquisite golden white light. All the kingdoms of the world below my feet and I was sailing on that golden white, and it went on forever.

All the people I had loved and lost were with me. All the people whose touches had lent me a sliver of this Elysium when I had been alive, and it was cold and painful and dark and just...hard. My wife was there. To welcome me. And my grandbaby whom I.........

...ah....!

...and my friends Rodimus, and Zolf. Even silly Noonsa. All there.

They told me....they said we've been waiting, Rezo.....well done, Rezo....I didn't understand yet.

And then a Woman's gentle hands....

I have never known a mother's touch, but this was just that.

"Welcome home, my child," She said. Her voice was like the universe condensed into one golden warm hum.

And welcomed I was. But something tugged at the left of my chest. Something panged. Was empty.

I asked why I was hurting still. My eyes freely wept as I lay there on that golden white sea being cleansed. My arms ached emptily.

She told me: It must be because your Reason is still alive in the mortal world. She said here Rezo, you will never hurt again. Here you will be able to see. Here you will never want.

I said, but I am hurting. That is why I asked You of it. I AM hurting. Let me go back. I know what is missing. My Light is still living. You are right.

She smiled at me. I can't remember what she looked like. Only that it was a smile both terrifying and gentle.

She said very well, if you are sure.

I am sure, I told Her. It will be cold and it will hurt sometimes, and there is much I will have to face that here I would have escaped. But he still lives, and I will follow him. If anything in that world or this, the next, is real, then I must be at his side until the day he too comes here. And then I will return with him.

Because you love him, She confirmed.

With all my heart, and soul, and mind, I love my child, I replied.

And that was when I awoke. Every bone and muscle ached. And before my eyes, darkness again.

But I was happy, Zelgadiss. Because I could be with you again. You see you are my Reason.

And look, it was so worth it. It was worth arthritis in my back and scars in my heart, and shame in my spirit, and the weight of atonement. Because I can be with you. I'm not sure I could ever convey it to you, Zelgadiss. How devotedly I love you. How sorry I am. How purely and unequivocally you saved me, the moment you were born into this world.

Your love has made it possible for me to know the love of our family. And your wife and her family. And your friends. Oh Zelgadiss. I am so glad I remembered why I came back again, a second time. Not some tainted Hellmaster's Jar. But the love I have for you that sustained me in darkness.

Sweet baby, all grown up, it's alright. Gam-Gam's home to stay


End file.
